Back in November, Nitro posted on The Known World by Edward Jones. The book won a Pulitzer and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Nitro seemed to back those calls without explicitly saying so. Dr J was merely whelmed by the book. It was sitting in my “to read” stack, so I decided to pick it up and see what it was all about.

My experience with this book can best be described by dividing the book into unequal thirds. In the first third, I was maybe too aware that there not a consensus on the book - as far as this site is concerned anyway. So maybe I was too keyed into how annoying the writing style was to me in this stage of the book. I felt that the writing was very expository, to distraction, in the early going (e.g., this happened, then that happened, they would not know at the time that this was the last time that it would happen - ever - which reminded the youngest of that time that the man with the funny walk came by, he would never come by again and he does not figure into the rest of this book in any meaningful way, but back to our story where this other thing happened to this other person…).

In the second third, either the book improved or I got pulled out of being hypercritical by the strength of the story through this stretch of the book. Suddenly there was some character development and a compelling story. So this part I actually enjoyed. This was the largest third of the book.

The final third was a downward spiral of despair and hopelessness. I didn’t buy Skiffington’s actions in this part of the book, which seem to be based upon a toothache. Or was the toothache a metaphor for the disease of slavery and its effects on society? I don’t know. The end of the book was sort of anti-climatic after the death and destruction that precedes it. Why was Alice the lunatic suddenly an amazing artist with no mental problems? Or was she some sort of metaphor for the flowering of a people when the chains of slavery have been removed? Why does the story at the end of the book lead me to assume that it must mean something else than what it is on its face?

I was wrestling with this book over a two week period that took me all over the rural southeast (GA, SC, & NC). In Georgia, bales of cotton the size of a Suburban were covered with tarps out in the fields. Co-operative cotton gins not only still exist but are operational. The economies of some of these towns is essentially unchanged since before the Civil War. How the work gets done has changed - if only slightly. I also came across a children’s “educational” book from the Civil War that has been put online by UNC called The Geographical Reader for Dixie Children. Here’s a quote that is typical of the justification for slavery at the time:

They know nothing of Jesus, and the climate in Africa is so unhealthy that white men can scarcely go there to preach to them. The slaves who are found in America are in much better condition. They are better fed, better clothed, and better instructed than in their native country. These people who are descendants of Ham the son of Noah; who was cursed because he did not treat his father with respect.–It was told him he should serve his brethren forever. That would seem a hard sentence but, it was probably done to show other children how wicked it was to treat their parents so. We can not tell how they came to be black, and have wool on their heads.

Delightful. Check out what the Reader has to say about Abraham Lincoln. Yipes. Anyway, I bring this up, because the source for the link (boingboing) also had a comment regarding a contemporary story about a school in North Carolina that has remarkably similar language in a school text, “slavery was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence”.

I think that Dr J’s beef with the book, without putting words in his mouth, is that the book suggests that black ownership of slaves was more common that it was. It also seems to suggest that becoming free was a matter of will, which it most certainly was not. I think that the book succeeds as a parable about the madness of owning people as property. Books like this are needed as a witness to the horrors of the past as that past recedes further into the rearview mirror of history. Particularly as nutjobs like Lynne Cheney (Dick’s wife) try to downplay the “unpleasant” aspects of history taught in US schools. It is a slippery slope from whitewashing history that leads to revisionist histories like those used in the school in North Carolina.

Anyway, enough of the soapbox. It wasn’t a great book, but clearly it made me think about things as I was driving through the rural south. And that’s not such a bad thing.